I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips.
A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14.
Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer.
Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.
That would certainly have been the argument at first. Battery life is EVERYTHING.
But Netflix announced they would be using it in 2016. YouTube started using in 2018, the year the standard hit 1.0.
Apple had plenty of warning and time to get the necessary hardware acceleration blocks available by now. Chips have multi-year timelines but it’s been 4+ years.
Now on the other side, Netflix actually started using it in early 2020/late 2021, depending on device. YouTube rolled it out wide in 2020. Twitch is working on it.
So Apple is at most 2 years behind the content. It’s not like it’s been 5+. And if they decided to wait to see how those early rollouts went due to hardware timelines it might make sense support only appears to be coming now (based on someone pointing out AV1 shows up now in the AVPlayer framework documentation).
I believe their main reasoning for not supporting AV1 would be the lack of hardware decoding on their chips.
I doubt it.
Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to decode AV1 in software. Sure, the battery life won’t be as good but there are other trade-offs that can be made.
Their latest chips were developed before AV1 had gained enough traction to be concerned about. I suspect that future M2 and M3 and A-series SoCs will have hardware decoding for AV1 built-in.
In the meanwhile, a future version of macOS Ventura and iOS 16 will have AV1 support; it’s just going to take a little longer. They probably want to roll it out simultaneously on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and iPadOS.
When AMD/Nvidia/Intel and Samsung/Mediatek/Rockchip/etc were able to put AV1 blocks into their chips, I'm sure Apple would be capable of doing the same -- if they wanted. Now it looks that they do not want.
A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14.
Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer.
Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.